


hope here needs a humble hand

by rooneykmara



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drug Withdrawal, F/M, Post-Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 02:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10527270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rooneykmara/pseuds/rooneykmara
Summary: No man is an island, this I knowBut can't you see?Maybe you were the ocean when I was just a stone.





	

  

Dark circles border underneath her eyes and every part of her looks weary.

There are moments, looking at her, that make him realize that he's done that. Today, her exhaustion is borne from overlapping shifts babysitting an infant and an adult man.

Both his fault.

He's taken Molly Hooper of the cherry print cardigan and the bad jokes and the brightest smile in the room and has stretched her to this. A specialist registrar and a primary caregiver and a sober companion when she really only signed up for that first job.

She's skittish around him, aware that the normalcy that he was able to fake during their cake outing has faded, and he's quickly hitting the worst of his comedown. She cleans around him, boils water for tea, but doesn't attempt any conversation.

He turns away from her restless movements and faces the wall, his knees bent, almost foetal in a desperate measure to stave off the pain. The nausea rises in a wave. He feels like he's hit the bottom of his self-hatred. And he snaps.

“You don't have to stay. I'm sure I can manage a night."

She continues to clean.

He continues, on a roll to expunge the bitterness that’s trapped inside, combined with bile and stomach acid into a mixture of chyme and loathing.

He wants her out. Out of his sight, out of his flat, out of his mind.

“Isn’t it pathetic that you’re having to be at the beck and call of both John and me now?”

She responds, her voice cool.

“I understand you're in pain.That doesn't make me your punching bag. What John did to handle his own pain cannot be passed on to another person. It ends with you.

It's not what you're looking for anyways.”

He sneers. “Oh? What am I looking for then?”

“Isn't it obvious?” she volleys back.

“No…”

“Redemption. You’re looking for redemption. You underwent this whole debacle, listened to Mary's instructions, because you thought it would somehow make you feel better, ease the guilt for her death that you’re carrying. It won’t do that.”

He's quiet. And then, softly, he exhales. "What will?”

She inches closer, incrementally, until he can feel her presence behind him. His back is still turned to the room, his front facing the wall. She sits down. Her head rests a few centimeters away from where his hand rests on the cushion. If he reached, he could tuck a stray hair behind her ear.

“I don’t know, Sherlock. I don’t know if anything really will. But the first step is realizing that it wasn’t your fault. Mary chose to jump in front of that bullet. She _chose_ to save you.”

He's heard this before. John had just said the same thing. John.

John had also said that Mary made him want to be the man she thought he was. That he should try for the same, chase down the Woman, and... be what she wanted him to be?

But.

"Molly, what do you want me to be?"

She arches her neck back, baffled.

"Why would I want you to be anything?"

"Don't you wish I was... better? Good?"

"I already think you're good."

"No, you don't. You can't possibly. You're here to spend the night to guarantee that I don't shoot up at some point."

"I think you're an addict. An addict that will search and seek out any justification to chase that high. But you're still the same person who faked your death for years to save your friends and did everything you possibly could to save Mary, time and time again."

He scrunches further back into the couch, pulling his dressing gown tighter around him to fight off a round of chills.

"It's too much," he finally croaks out and he doesn't know what he's referring to, the pain of Mary’s death that has its tenterhooks deep in his heart and soul or the shuddering pain that roils up his muscles, his stomach, the inside of his eyeballs.

Molly doesn’t ask. She hums, and walks away, comes back with a thick blanket. It’s not one of his, but he is very familiar with the pattern of the afghan that usually stretches out across her bed.

She slowly places it over his shoulders, leaves and comes back again with a cup of tea and a sandwich that he ignores.

She spends the night across from him in John’s chair, after he steadfastly refuses to move to the bed. Finally, huddled beyond any reasonable expectation of comfort, she drifts off, her head nestled into her shoulder, her entire body still angled toward him.

He watches her slow breathing with a feeling of envy at her ability to sleep…and something else. Soundlessly, he gets up and stretches the afghan around her instead.

Somehow, he doesn’t need it anymore. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title and description from "Black Flies" by Ben Howard.


End file.
